Open Source a Judgment Standard

Recasting the App Development Arena

Open Source is changing the way that Gartner Group measures the application development market. The big loser as a result may well be proprietary Java application development tools.

Laurie F. Wurster, research director at Gartner Research, explained that
Gartner has undergone a major change in methodology.

"Previous to this year we counted new license revenue," Wurster told
LinuxPlanet. "This year we're doing total software revenue, which
includes license revenue. It also includes updates/upgrades. It includes
subscriptions and ASP models. We also include support revenue and
maintenance contracts.

"We feel this is a better long-term predictor of the market especially as
markets start to mature," Wurster added.

Wurster is the co-author, along with Fabrizio Biscotti, of the report "Market Share: Application Development and Project and Portfolio Management, Worldwide, 2005."

Open source is significantly impacting three areas of application
development, according to Gartner, which includes testing tools, change
configuration management and Java development.

"In our previous method using license revenue only, there was really no way
to count what the impact of open source was except to say that the
application development market is declining," Wurster explained.

"The reason why the application development market is declining is because people are
starting to use open source. It is one of the most mature open source
markets."

Wurster noted that without the open source numbers in the report, the
application development market is actually in a state of decline on a year-over-year basis. Open source is taking the declining part of the application development market.

"Open source is funny because there isn't, in terms of the normal standards,
revenue attached to it in many cases," Wurster said. "So we had to put
together some assumptions on how it's actually impacting and put dollar
numbers around those assumptions."

The impact of open source, though, is relatively clear with proprietary Java
development, testing tools, and software change and configuration tools
declining in growth due to strong open source development tool adoption in
the same areas.

The report notes that the traditional Java development tools
segment declined by 2 percent on a year-over-year basis. In contrast, open
source software increased by 21 percent.

The Gartner report pegged the total worldwide growth of the
application development and project and portfolio management software market
at 6.7 percent with total 2005 revenues of more than $7.0 billion. Without
including open source in the numbers, the growth rate would have only been 4.4 percent.

In terms of vendor share, IBM held the lead in total software revenue with a
25.4 percent market share. Microsoft came in second and CA came in third.

"Gartner's ranking of IBM as the No. 1 application development vendor
for the fifth consecutive year is a testament to our Rational portfolio
built on open standards," said Daniel Sabbah, general manager of Rational
software at IBM.

"We have more than double the market share of our nearest
competitor, Microsoft, and we are continuing to see strong momentum with
developers, partners and customers around our portfolio."